


My Heart Broke Down to Powder There and I Wish I’d Let It Show

by theshipsfirstmate



Series: I Found Peace in Your Violence [3]
Category: Daredevil (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, bc kastle is too muchhhh, kastle - Freeform, kastle fic, post-Season 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-15 06:40:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13607724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theshipsfirstmate/pseuds/theshipsfirstmate
Summary: post-s1 Kastle. It’s been three days since Karen’s blood turned to ice at the first news of the shootout in Central Park. The white roses are still in the window, but this time around, Frank knocks at her front door.“I know what I deserve.” She hears her voice, low and dark. She can almost see herself in the black of his eyes. “And I get to decide what I want.”Part three of this little series, follow-up to I Found Peace in Your Violence & directly follows And I’ll Hold You With Such Delicacy, but can also pretty much stand alone.





	My Heart Broke Down to Powder There and I Wish I’d Let It Show

_Title from “[Die Then Grow](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DOeURV6pOCLw&t=YzM2MDkxMzNjZTI0OTk5MzRhMmIyZDk3ZmY5OGIyNGI4ZDg4M2ZiNCxkSmdSQjhCVg%3D%3D&b=t%3AiAw4tJIAalN1OvhWtUFPsQ&p=http%3A%2F%2Ftheshipsfirstmate.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F170629841099%2Fpunisher-fic-my-heart-broke-down-to-powder-there&m=1)” by The Avett Brothers._

**My Heart Broke Down to Powder There and I Wish I’d Let It Show  
**

When she hears the knock at her front door, somehow she just knows.

There’s no reason he’d be there instead of at the window. There’s no reason he should be here at all, really. Karen’s been mulling best case scenarios, and she figured he’d be in jail at least. There’s no reason she should open the door without checking the peephole, she doesn’t even have her gun close at hand. But somehow, she just knows.

It’s been three days. Three days since her blood turned to ice at the first reports of the shootout in Central Park coming in over her police scanner app in the middle of the night. When her hands stopped shaking, or at least slowed enough to key in her laptop password, she had immediately opened the Bulletin’s internal messaging service to skim the breaking news channel – and stopped breathing the second she read the word “carousel.”

 _Stay the hell away from this,_  Ellison had warned her in a private chat window as soon as he saw her online.  _I’m not joking around, Page, I find out you were anywhere near that park and you’ll never publish a story for me again._

It’s the sharpest he’s ever been with her, and that it was mostly in service of her safety softened her a bit, and delayed the inevitable panic about the extent to which he knew things — and how, exactly, he knew them. Karen respects the man, admires him even, and so she followed his orders as closely as she possibly could. She made a promise and kept it: she hadn’t gone to the park.

But she did go to the hospital.

She hounded a dispatcher until she found out where the Central Park ambulances were routed –  _five of them,_ she had choked on a sob and tried to make it sound like a cough, the poor guy already though she was nuts. She bolted down the stairs of her building, waiting maybe a minute on the curb before deciding to run the dozen or so blocks in the early hours of the morning, beating the red rays of the rising sun into the emergency room lobby of New York Presbyterian.

There was an old woman outside the front entrance, selling bundles of white roses. Karen paused for a second, but didn’t buy one.

She doesn’t remember a lot of what happened in the hospital that morning. She knows she paced the hallways and accosted at least one of the care providers at the reception desk. Maybe it was more. Maybe a nurse too, or a couple of unfortunate interns. Frank was nowhere to be found, and no one seemed to know anything. She recalls the taste of copper when she bit at the inside of her cheek until it bled. The only thing that eased her terror, just a little, was that no one in the morgue had him either.

Foggy came to pick her up, eventually. She must have called him, or maybe Ellison did. The only thing she remembers is seeing her friend’s helpless, pitying eyes,  _again_ , so soon after the last time. It only made her cry harder.

The next few days have been clearer, but just as fraught. She hasn’t slept much, and when she does, it’s barely anything – there’s a notepad on her bedside table full of adrenaline-fueled half-ideas she’s scribbled down after jolting awake from yet another nightmare. She’s spent every waking hour in front of her laptop, going cross-eyed looking for a clue, looking for a way in, looking for the answer to a question she hasn’t thought to ask yet. Looking for what happened then, and what’s going to happen next. Looking for him.

And now, he’s here. Somehow, she just knows.

She throws the deadbolt and is in his arms the second his eyes meet hers from the hallway. Frank’s ready, catching her like he was waiting for it, whispering her name against the shell of her ear as he holds her almost too tight. She doesn’t care. Every bit of terror that’s been coursing through her bloodstream is suddenly forcing itself out, exploding from her pores. She feels him everywhere – banded around her back, solid against her chest, nuzzling at her temple – and she doesn’t know whether she’s going to cry or kiss him until suddenly, she’s doing both at the same time

She pulls back enough to put her hands on his cheeks and tip his forehead down to hers. She means for it to ground them, like it had in the hotel elevator that day, but the pull is magnetic and now their poles have learned how to find each other unerringly. Just as their lips come together, though, she lets out an embarrassingly audible sob.

“Hey, hey, shh, it’s okay.” Frank goes still as he draws back from the almost-kiss, raspy words brushing against her cheek, and she buries her face in his shoulder as her whole body starts to shake. He steps them inside the entryway, using his arms banded around her back to lift her slightly off the ground like it’s nothing, and shuts the door behind them.

Holding each other in this space is becoming something of a habit for them, but it’s so much different now that she knows what she’s been missing, what she almost lost again. She’s practically feral, clawing at his back, and she can’t find it in herself to care. It’s so much more when it almost never was.

“It’s okay. I’m okay,” Frank tells her over and over again. The repetition, and the feeling of him, solid in her arms, push her towards accepting his assurances as truth, and eventually her sobs slow to silent shudders. When she finds her own words, she whispers them against his collarbone.

“I couldn’t find you.” She still doesn’t know where he was for almost that whole first day after Central Park, but 30 or so hours after the initial dispatch call, there had been an admission record for Pete Castiglioni at the same hospital. She had accosted at least four different government agencies trying to get in a room with him. All of them refused outright. Whoever answered the phone at NYPD central had flat-out laughed at her. “They wouldn’t… I couldn’t–”

“I’m okay.” He says it again, low against the corner of her mouth, and she believes him a little more, heaving in one deep, shuddering breath after another. “In fact, I’m a free man.”

That news makes her still, eyes going wide, and when she pulls back to look, he’s smiling right at her. It’s small, but so bright and hopeful it makes her knees knock together and her arms tighten up around his neck. “At least, Pete is,” he clarifies after a moment. Her nose wrinkles at the name and he huffs out a little laugh like he can’t help it either.

It’s a long moment then, that Karen stands there, just staring at him. She still hasn’t kissed him properly, and she weighs that desire against the simple bliss of looking into eyes she wasn’t sure she’d ever see again. He’s tired, there are dark circles just beneath his long lashes that she knows aren’t bruises. She probably has some of her own to match. He’s here, warm in her arms and looking at her like she’s everything he’s ever needed, when she realizes that almost certainly isn’t true.

“Do you… can I get you anything?” He’s been locked up somewhere for the better part of three days and she’s worried about looking tired.

Frank doesn’t answer her question right away, letting his gaze drift over to the windowsill, where the pot of white roses still sits in wait. She feels his hands flex against her waist, and when he looks back at her, something swells in her chest until she’s babbling nervously again. “Do you need a drink? Something to eat, or some aspirin or… anything?”

His eyes flash at “anything,” or maybe she just imagines it. He takes a half-step back, but still, they stay intertwined. It’s new, she thinks, this reluctance to let each other go. It feels new. Maybe it’s just that they’re giving into it.

“I had some civvies in the van, but a shower wasn’t uh, exactly part of the discharge deal,” he answers eventually. She’s definitely not imagining the extra gravel in his voice, the blush that starts to stain his cheeks. “Any chance I could use your bathroom for a quick clean-up?”

“Yes.” Karen’s momentarily struck dumb at the thought of him in her shower, steam curling around the hard planes of his torso. “Yeah, of course.”

She leads him haltingly through her bedroom to the master bath, still holding his hand, dropping it only to reach in and flick the shower knob on. “Everything’s… in there,” she gestures back to the open cabinet as she awkwardly hands him a spare towel. He offers a polite nod and then a look when their eyes meet that seems to heat with the water. “Or it's… you know, it’s already in the shower.”

She shakes her head to dispel the nervous energy and turns to go, but Frank catches her gently by the wrist. He’s still smiling, just a little, and it’s so foreign on his face, he almost looks like a stranger. Almost.

“Hey…”

“They wouldn’t let me see you.” Her breathing had been slowing back to normal, but her exhausted, scattered mind is still racing and the words spill out of her before he can speak.  “Apparently there are some concerns about the nature of our relationship, seeing as how I helped you escape and everything, and they wouldn’t let me…”

It’s mean to be a joke – or at least adjacent to one, as close as she can get right now — but his eyes narrow, wiping almost all of that beautiful mirth right off his face and erasing whatever it is he meant to say. “Who’s giving you trouble?”

“No one, it’s fine. It’s just, I’m still a witness, technically, in the…Lewis, and the hotel.” She leaves out the parts where she had stayed silent in her apartment when uniformed officers pounded at the door, doesn’t mention the half dozen or so people who have wondered aloud why she cares so much about what happens to Frank Castle. “They couldn’t have let me to you even if they wanted.”

“That’s for the best,” he insists, eyebrows still furrowed, shaking his head against what seems like an onslaught of unpleasant possibilities. “You shouldn’t have done any of this.”

“I didn’t  _do_  anything. That was the worst part, that I couldn’t do anything, that I couldn’t see you, that I didn’t know–”

His hand squeezes hers again before he reaches up to cup her cheek. She closes her eyes for a second, and simply  _feels_ , unable to stop her next confession. “I just didn’t want you to think I wasn’t looking.”

“C'mon, Page,” his casual use of her last name makes it impossible not to meet his gaze again, “I know you better than that.”

She just nods, hoping that her watery half-smile gets blurred by the steam gathering in the small room. But his hand is still on her cheek and it makes her take shallow, almost gasping breaths of the hot, thickening air.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch sooner.” He’s always apologizing. She might be the only person in the city, in the whole world, who knows that about him. “I’m sorry it was hard for you. I’m sorry it always is.”

“It’s okay. You’re okay.” It’s the first time she’s repeated it back to him. She can only tell him the truth, after all. “That makes it easier.”

Frank leans in and places a soft kiss right at the corner of her mouth, faltering only a little when her breath catches audibly. “Thank you,” he nearly whispers, when their foreheads tip together once again.

“I–” She almost just up and says it, that’s how much her head is still spinning. “You’re welcome.”

She finally backs out of the room when the steam starts to cloud heavy around them, meeting his eyes one more time as she shuts the door. She doesn’t make it far on slightly wobbly legs, though, sitting down on the side of her bed, and listening to the muffled sounds from the bathroom.

There’s something so surreal about the uneven cadence of him in her shower, the scent of her lavender body wash drifting out with the humid air from the crack under the door. Frank emerges minutes later in a wrinkled t-shirt and low-slung sweats that must have been stuffed into the small bag on his shoulder. He’s dressed like he’s staying, but she’s too afraid to ask.

The whole of the moment feels so intimate that Karen stands, almost unconsciously, and then suddenly, she’s right in front of him.

His short hair is wet and his face is bruised but scrubbed clean. He looks younger than she’s ever seen him, and more fragile too. This time, her hands drift up to frame his face. “Can I–?”

He doesn’t know what she’s asking. Or maybe he does. Either way, he says “Yes” before she finishes the question, so quickly that she’s barely taken another breath before she’s pressing her lips to his.

This kiss is like none they’ve shared before. This is slow and languid, like a Sunday morning when the rain clouds are just starting to break, quiet and soft like the muted city streets during the second day of a winter snowfall. It crackles like electricity and hums like a steady engine and she is enamored in a way that makes her feel more hopeful than she has in years.

Still, when they pause for a breath, Karen’s instinct is to draw back, to drop her face to the ground and avoid seeing anything in his eyes that would yank that feeling out from under her. This time though, Frank catches her by the waist, pulling her towards him once again.

“I feel like I keep throwing myself at you.” She can feel the heat on her cheeks as she whispers the admission between kisses that are starting to lose any sense of chasteness. “That’s probably not fair.”

He takes a split second to grin like she’s said something funny, and she very nearly presses her lips to his teeth. “I kissed you first.”

“Yes, you did.” Her chest lightens and her smile mirrors his when she recalls the emphatic embrace, the feeling of his palms on her thighs. It wasn’t that long ago, that they had found themselves tangled up on her couch, but it feels almost like a lifetime. “Why did you do that, anyway?”

“You said something about loneliness,” he admits quietly, and she realizes that he’s talking about a kiss on her cheek instead, a dark night by the river. She almost can’t believe he remembers, even though she can still see it vividly, like it’s playing out on a movie screen on the back of her eyelids. “Something that told me you understood.”

Karen just nods, though the back of her neck is starting to stiffen. He keeps speaking, and it might be the most he’s ever said to her.

“I knew I couldn’t fix it. And I knew I couldn’t stay.” Frank’s voice cracks a little, and she tightens her arms around his shoulders. “I couldn’t do any of the things I wanted, but I couldn’t do nothing, either.”

They’re breathing the same breaths, faces so close that when he moves, their noses brush against one another.

“You had this look in your eye, and I just–” He glances past her for a moment, like he’s seeing that night play out too, and Karen’s cheek burns with the memory of his hesitant lips. “I was selfish. I took what I could, and I hightailed it out of there before you smacked me sideways.”

She laughs a little to herself, remembering how long she stood there frozen, wondering if a stiff breeze would blow her right into the Hudson.

“I wish you would have stayed.” She’s talking about that night, and the nights here at her apartment too. She’s talking about every night they spend together – and every night they don’t. “I always want you to stay.”

He nods and steps even closer, but his attention is suddenly drawn to something over her shoulder. She turns with his body when he brushes softly past her, leaving not an inch of space between them.

“What have you been working on?” He picks up the notepad on the nightstand and a piece of paper flutters to the ground. She doesn’t have to look twice to know what it is. But when he picks it up, and realizes, he looks back up at her like he’s seeing it for the first time.

 _If there’s anything left, it’s yours._  It still makes her heart skip a beat. But she’s not sure he even remembers, and if he does–

“Did you mean it?” She asks before she can stop herself.

“Yeah.” The question causes him to blink away some of the surprise on his face. He answers quickly, and then, as if to assure her that it wasn’t without thought, repeats himself. “Yeah, I meant it.”

He’s not smiling now, and she can practically see him turning more words over with his tongue. So she waits. His eyes look a little lost, but his tone doesn’t waiver. “I’m just not sure what it means.”

Karen doesn’t either. She’s spent hours reading those words over in her mind, wrestling with sleepless nights and the thoughts of what a future with Frank Castle could possibly hold.

He must be thinking the same thing, because when he speaks, it’s just what she’s been imagining. “I can’t give you what you–”

“Stop.” It comes out sharp, just like she feels when she hears those wobbly words yet again, just like the way the hairs on her arms raise to barbed wire points at the way he gets so close and then pulls back. She’s all edges, and he didn’t make her that way, but she needs him to understand that they’re about to have this conversation for the last time. “Just stop, Frank. I don’t want to hear it. I can’t do that every time we…do  _this_.”

He’s as stubborn as she is, though, she’s known that since they met. “You deserve a  _life_ , Karen. You should want so much more.”

“I know what I deserve.” She hears her voice, low and dark. She can almost see herself in the black of his eyes. “And I get to decide what I want.”

Last time, they were on the edge of a cliff, skittering pebbles over the side as they dragged their feet to a stop. This time, she thinks, it feels a lot like jumping. “And it’s you,” she tells him breathlessly. “All of it.”

He kisses her again, and this time it’s searing hot, and so deep she feels it in her toes. She knows it’s not what he was planning to do, not the argument he was planning to make. She’s only human though, so she waits until his tongue tangles with her own to pull him back.

“Hnnh, hold on.” She can’t let this thing run on lust alone, especially when he keeps second-guessing himself. “I told you what I want. If you want to be here, be here. If you don’t, go. That’s the only thing I’m asking for. That’s the only thing you have to give me.”

He’s panting like he’s run a mile, and his eyes take a minute to regain their focus. She cups his cheek and he practically melts into it, nuzzling into the palm of her hand. “I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

She can’t help smiling at his drowsy tone, how he goes from steely to soft in the blink of an eye. “How come you do that, huh? Fight with me and then go all mushy.”

“I told you. It’s that look in your eyes.”

Her heart swells at that, and for a moment, it’s too much. She takes a step back and sits down on the edge of the bed, skimming down his arm to keep hold of one of his hands.

“I interviewed the kids from the carousel.” She remembers the way the pair had clung to each other, the boy ignoring every one of the nurses’ pleas to get back in his own hospital bed. It had made her ache, acutely and specifically.

“They okay?” Karen nods, heart cracking a little at Frank’s concern. It must have been the hardest thing he’s ever done, going back there to relive the worst night of his life – to face down a man he thought was family at the very place he lost his own – and still, he’s worried about the innocents. He’s farther from a monster than anyone will ever know.

She nods, swallowing against the lump in her throat. “They said you saved their lives, and stayed until the cops and medics showed up.”

“Probably a stupid move,” he shuffles his feet and looks down at them. “But it all worked out, I guess.”

“I told them it sounded like you.” He nods with just the tiniest hint of a smile, then looks away again. “Is Madani going to be okay?”

Another nod. “She’s too tough for her own good.” And then a revelation. “She’s the one who got me set free, you know. Talked Marion James and her buddies into the whole deal.”

Karen says a silent prayer of gratitude for the cop, vowing to thank her for what she’s done, and trust her if it ever comes to that again. When she opens her eyes, Frank’s sitting down next to her on the edge of the bed.

“She asked me what freedom meant to me, James did,” he says after another quiet moment. “This was the first thing I thought of.”

Karen glances back at him, and his eyes are on their still-intertwined hands. “I thought about you telling me that you wanted me to have an after,” he continues. “I thought about being able to knock at your door instead of climbing up to your window.”

He looks up at her then, and she tries to breathe evenly under the weight of his heavy gaze. “I thought about you.”

Their foreheads drop together once again, and she whispers “Me too” against his lips before sliding back to sit against her headboard. Frank follows without any prompting, and somehow that feels like the most intimate confession yet.

“So what’s next?” Karen asks after they’ve settled, hands tangling unconsciously once again. “What’s next for… Pete?” He frowns and shakes his head immediately at the moniker.

“Not for you.” The words are firm but he gives her a tiny smile that turns her whole stomach upside-down. “You call me Frank… please.”

“Okay.” She licks her lips. It’s an unconscious movement until he follows it with his eyes. “Frank. What’s next?”

“Not so sure.” It feels light, almost like a normal conversation, and she sighs softly at the simplicity. “Got an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner at the Liebermans.”

They both laugh a little at that, at the thought of his scratchy lines in the middle of some kind of Norman Rockwell painting. “That doesn’t sound like….”

“Nah, I can’t do that.” He picks her off before she can bother stumbling good-naturedly around the issue. “And David knows it. Just invited me to be nice.”

His dismissiveness makes her frown just a little. “That’s not the only reason.” Frank just shrugs.

“I’d like to meet him someday.” That’s as much as she’ll let herself continue to push him for now, as close as she’ll tred towards talk of the future.

“Yeah, maybe someday.” He nods and glances over, and despite his noncommittal answer, she gets the sense he’s not just saying it to placate her. “Anyway, Curtis’ group has a meeting tomorrow. Thought I’d go there, then afterwards I can talk to him about finding a place to live.”

And good lord, if her hammering heart didn’t belong to this man already, it sure as hell would at that. Because for as many times as the world has knocked him back, he’s trying to take a step forward. He’s looking for a road ahead of him, and what’s more, he’s seeing one.

“I think that sounds like a really good idea.” A weight starts to lift off her chest in that moment, something that feels like a thousand pounds. But it’s not all the way gone, until he speaks again.

“But tonight,” he says, like he knows she’s still afraid to ask, “I’d like to stay here with you.”

“Yeah?” He nods in response to her breathless question. “And you’ll  _stay_?”

“Yes, Karen.” She wonders if he sees her eyes darken when he says her name, as she’s almost certain they do. She wonders how much of herself she gives away in a moment that feels so small. “I’ll stay.”

“Okay.” She smiles, suddenly hit with a rush of awkward jitters. It’s silly, they’re already in her bed, and they’ve even done this once before — but she was so weary then that she hardly remembers the logistics.

The sun has barely even set outside her drawn curtains, but she knows they’re both beyond exhausted, and pulls the covers back to settle in. When the silence persists between them, though, she realizes that he may be having his own moment about the implications of sharing a bed. “Want me to grab an extra blanket? Or the couch? It’s fine if you don’t want to–”

“No,” Frank shakes his head, “no, it’s okay.”

She forgets sometimes, that he’s done all of this before. She forgets that for him it might feel more like a betrayal than a beginning. “I don’t want you to do anything you don’t wanna do.”

“Karen, I haven’t slept in three days.” He slides his legs underneath the covers and she shivers a little when they brush up against her own. “I’m not sure I’ve ever wanted anything as much as this.”

She stays silent, unsure of how to answer with warring senses of hope and dread-tinged deja vu starting to bubble up in her gut. She doesn’t even notice how far she’s folded into herself until Frank’s cupping her chin and turning her face towards his. “I’m just… I’m trying to figure out how to stay with you tonight and keep myself from wanting a thousand more things.”

If this day has been a rollercoaster, those words are the flashbulbs that go off to take your picture right at the last big drop. Karen blinks. “It’s not wrong to want things, Frank,” she tells him, not for the first time.  _Some of them, you can have,_ she finishes to herself.  

He nods, solemnly, pressing a kiss to her cheek that feels familiar and brand new at the same time and answering before he pulls back. “I feel it starting already, though, is the thing.”

His voice is low and it rumbles goosebumps across her neck. “I wanna stay here forever, I wanna take you out to dinner. I wanna take you to breakfast.” He’s not running, she realizes belatedly. He’s trying to hold himself back. “I wanna take you out of the city, drive down the shore as far as we can go, and wake up to nothing but the sound of the waves.”

God, she wants that too. She didn’t even know it until the words spilled from his lips, but she does. She wants to go everywhere with him, anywhere he wants, and a thousand other places. But more than all of that, she wants him to trust himself enough to be here now.

“Well, as long as the world doesn’t end tonight, there will be time for that,” she muses, mustering every bit of assurance she hasn’t already burned out on her own insecurities. “And if it does–”

She looks over at him on the pillow next to hers and her heart takes a stutter step. She almost told him outright earlier, and now she realizes that there are about a million different ways to say the words. “If it does, I’d want to be with you, anyway.”

“Yeah.” He smiles again, and her stomach does another little flip. “Me too.”

“Okay then.” She pulls the covers up around them, and turns in his arms when he moves to wrap himself wholly around her. “Let’s just start with tonight. That’s enough.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” he mumbles against her neck, but she can tell that he’s already getting pulled under. The last thing she remembers before she follows is an unfamiliar feeling of contentment, safety, peace. Actually, it feels a whole lot like freedom.

* * *

She wakes in the morning to an empty bed and a brief moment of panic, until the smell of coffee and the sounds of quiet bustle in her kitchen bring her fully awake. She grins to herself, casting a glance to the scrap of paper on the nightstand.

When she reaches over, she notices that there’s a note scribbled on both sides now. One she can recite from memory, the other a new addition. It’s simple but somehow just as important.

_Went for breakfast, back soon._

Just as she’s setting the note back down, Frank rounds the door of her bedroom, takeout cups in hand, and that small smile on his face that she still can’t quite believe. For a man so understandably unsure of promises, Karen thinks, he’s pretty good at keeping them.


End file.
